The Man of Letters as a Man of Business eBook

tradesmen, and other flowers of our plutocracy on
equal terms. But, unfortunately, from a business
point of view, he is also an artist, and the very
qualities that enable him to delight the public disable
him from delighting it uninterruptedly. “No
rose blooms right along,” as the English boys
at Oxford made an American collegian say in a theme
which they imagined for him in his national parlance;
and the man of letters, as an artist, is apt to have
times and seasons when he cannot blossom. Very
often it shall happen that his mind will lie fallow
between novels or stories for weeks and months at a
stretch; when the suggestions of the friendly editor
shall fail to fruit in the essays or articles desired;
when the muse shall altogether withhold herself, or
shall respond only in a feeble dribble of verse which
he might sell indeed, but which it would not be good
business for him to put on the market. But supposing
him to be a very diligent and continuous worker, and
so happy as to have fallen on a theme that delights
him and bears him along, he may please himself so
ill with the result of his labors that he can do nothing
less in artistic conscience than destroy a day’s
work, a week’s work, a month’s work.
I know one man of letters who wrote to-day and tore
up tomorrow for nearly a whole summer. But even
if part of the mistaken work may be saved, because
it is good work out of place, and not intrinsically
bad, the task of reconstruction wants almost as much
time as the production; and then, when all seems done,
comes the anxious and endless process of revision.
These drawbacks reduce the earning capacity of what
I may call the high-cost man of letters in such measure
that an author whose name is known everywhere, and
whose reputation is commensurate with the boundaries
of his country, if it does not transcend them, shall
have the income, say, of a rising young physician,
known to a few people in a subordinate city.

In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author
in the presence of a nation of business men like ours,
I do not know that I can establish the man of letters
in the popular esteem as very much of a business man,
after all. He must still have a low rank among
practical people; and he will be regarded by the great
mass of Americans as perhaps a little off, a little
funny, a little soft! Perhaps not; and yet I would
rather not have a consensus of public opinion on the
question; I think I am more comfortable without it.

III.

There is this to be said in defence of men of letters
on the business side, that literature is still an
infant industry with us, and, so far from having been
protected by our laws, it was exposed for ninety years
after the foundation of the republic to the vicious
competition of stolen goods. It is true that
we now have the international copyright law at last,
and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but
literary property has only forty-two years of life